


Seven & The Ragged Nun

by Mauser_Frau



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Chronic Illness, Drama, Drug Use, Early Children of the Vault, F/M, Gen, Multi, Pretentious Literary References, Sibling Relationship, Troy Calypso POV, Troyreen, Tyreen being Tyreen, building off of canon, but you also get, eventually, graphic medical content, though I add weird stuff, what's probably blasphemy, who here ordered the techno nuns, why not both, you can have both
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:34:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29113116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mauser_Frau/pseuds/Mauser_Frau
Summary: It's one thing to say you're a God King.  It's another to project the gravity you need to keep getting away with it at your newfound followers.  And maybe you've got a bit of amedical mysteryin your back pocket besides.  HowGrimeverse Troyended up with his first prosthetic and maybe some answers.Made with love for everyone who's encouraged Grimeverse in the past year.  Spoilers for rather a lot, but includes summaries of past events.
Relationships: Troy Calypso/Original Characters, Troy Calypso/Tyreen Calypso
Kudos: 3
Collections: Grimeverse





	1. Chapter 1

He and Dr. Black were listening to a bunch of skags eating or screwing each other— it was hard to tell —while smoking expensive vape pens that apparently tasted like blackberry cream. Troy had never eaten blackberry cream, and couldn’t comment beyond getting himself loopy on the marijuana at hand. Stars showed up regardless, gobs of them, interrupted by satellites and yelps and wayward rakks. 

Despite the lack of a lantern, Dr. Black was in the process of cleaning her Hyperion repeater pistol. She insisted it had been a gift, but she wasn’t having trouble reassembling the thing by starlight, so she must have known it well, somehow determined that touching up the inside of the barrel with a spitty chiffonnette wouldn’t do any harm. 

She licked a second one and used it to mop at the dry spot on Troy’s mouth, the one he got on the left side if he smoked or sighed too much. Troy caught it on his snaggletooth and growled. 

“Fourths? Absolutely,” said Dr. Black, handing the pen back to him after she’d puffed on it herself. The night smelled of cool sand and fruit and a random childhood memory like tended to surface when he got exactly high enough. Memory of what, that didn’t stay long enough for him to grasp. It was something else nice, anyway

Troy liked Dr. Black too, even realizing he only knew her as a matter of convenience. She was the person who’d patched up Tyreen after the Neuron Spectres had shot her. Well, Dr. Black walked  _ him  _ through the draining and stitches and catheter insertion, then knocked him right out with a sedative hypo so she could play with his feet.

Which was weird, but sure beat paying her money they didn’t have. He had no hard feelings given her, if not positive, then  _ entertaining  _ qualities. She made him chipped beef with bouillon grits since milk didn’t agree with him. She’d taught him how to reduce avulsed fractures with a leather strap. That was just cool. She put guns back together in the dark and she touched him more than he found typical after a standard year on Pandora.

He leaned over, getting the very stoned idea that he could spring one of her curls and this would establish an equilibrium between them after the chiffonnette blot. However, Troy reached out as she turned his way. He went to pull to the side and brought his hand down cockeyed on the table. His ring finger popped. Pain shot down to his wrist.

“Dammit,” he muttered. The digit resisted his attempts to shake it back into place. Troy went to pull it to rights with his teeth.

But speaking of Dr. Black touching him, she held out her hand, beckoning when he didn’t give his up fast enough. 

So instead, he rested his red markings beside her red gun parts and let her fiddle with him. She tilted him from side to side and front to back, then prodded all of his knuckles with her boney fingertips. He obligingly hissed when she got to the smarting one, unsure if she could have heard a simple huff over the skags.

“You do that a lot, big honey?” asked Dr. Black. “Wait, no, Dumb question. You didn’t say  _ ouch  _ when it happened and I kind of maybe saw your little splint ring collection.”

“Sometimes?” the same way Troy had no grasp of what blackberry cream was supposed to taste like, he had no metric for a lot in this case, unless a lot meant more than his sister. “Anyway, those were our mom’s.”

“I seeeee. In that case, I diagnose you with needing your own set and a cold pack.” A single-use one of the latter appeared from one of her many pockets. She cracked it and set it on the least smudged end of her towel to chill.

“You mean, ah… huh…” He had to smack his mouth sideways to get the words to come out. “What if it was a lot? And it wasn’t just my hand?”

“Well, I’d ask to see said hand wrapped around your opposite wrist.”

“Ah, maybe tomorrow.”

“Fold your thumb across your palm?”

This didn’t impact his sore joint. Troy did so and showed her.

Dr. Black repeated the gesture. He noticed with her, as with his sister, as with a handful of tricks who’d gone along with him after a few beers or blow jobs, that her thumb certainly didn’t reach off of the far end like his did. She hummed, scratching her head before she spoke to him rather than the snorty desert this time. “Plus the long face and all the squishy scars in your shoulder.”

“My feet. Which are much better today.” Troy did scuff his boots, mentioning them. He chose to leave his teeth out of it for the time being since she’d already called attention to that with the chiffonnette. “Look, I know there’s something screwy with me besides the obvious stuff.”

“Oh gosh. So I don’t have to break it to you that your collagen appears to be made out of waffles and pixie dust instead of, you know, collagen?”

Ordinarily, Troy would have laughed, but he couldn’t seem to fathom if Dr. Black was being sarcastic or if she was genuinely afraid of upsetting him with what was, in fact, very old news. 

The look on her face took up the exact space between exaggeration and honesty.

“No,” he said.

“Good, good.”

“So, if you had to guess?”

“Unlike Sirens, croupiers make awful patients.”

“Humor me.” He forced the request to sound casual, though there was some part of him, as distant as that memory he couldn’t quite catch, there and insisting that if he could know  _ right now _ , he had better know.

“Based on all information available to me personally in this moment of existence?” Dr. Black crossed her thumbs over both of her palms, still talking along though she was. “Not otherwise specified. Your mother wouldn’t have been around to be your mother if anyone had known what she had. I do think it was her, given what you said about those being her rings.”

Her blunt deduction didn’t hit him as hard as maybe it should have. It made sense given the relative little he knew about how the Six Galaxies handled potential children: that Romans had exposed undesirable infants and morning after pills gave him indigestion, same as milk. He’d been curious, then and now again. It was kind of depressing to think back on all the hours he’d spent trying to put a name to something a professional pronounced didn’t have one. 

Ah, well. He could move on from here now, same as he had bringing Tyreen all this way to Dr. Black’s space in the desert.

She said, “It also means you’re the only one of you twice over. And wow, that’s ironic.”

“It is,” he agreed, even though it really wasn’t. “Next question. Would I be better off if I had anything done?” He left anything about  _ what  _ open-ended, hoping for advice to follow from there. 

“Hmm. I think that’s maybe gotta be something you figure out. You’re doing pretty good managing your falling-apart-at-the-seams-itis.”

Troy nodded. A compliment was a compliment. 

“And why ask me if your aorta hasn’t ruptured into your chest cavity or somesuch?” Dr. Black’s specialty was trauma, not because she had any particular training in trauma medicine, but trauma was what arrived on her doorstep and once or twice onto Troy’s shoes since he and his sister were kind of living with her. As a result of her experience, she was all about penetrating gunshot wounds, rather than slowly malfunctioning spines or air conditioning units.

Troy almost answered that he trusted her. Instead, he said, “You’re a doctor and I have somebody to take care of now. That’s something I wanted. Please don’t tell her I said that.”

“Doctor-patient privilege. I heard nothing.” Meanwhile, and speaking of the air conditioning, a loud  _ SPACK  _ noise sent the skags and no small amount of other wildlife scattering into the moonlight. “Except that.”

“Where’s the headlamp? I’ll give it another look,” said Troy. “And then ice my hand. Might as well get any work out of the way before it swells up, right?”

“Don’t waste more than ten minutes on it, OK?” replied Dr. Black.

He nodded. Gun parts clanked below him as he got to his feet and tipped his intact shoulder at her.

She, and her ambient disasters, were how Troy ended up accepting one of a handful of things he and Dr. Black had in common.

Between his time working for the woman, his gutshot sister, the fact said sister had functionally kidnapped him, the apparently horrific circumstances of his mother’s death and his own accident of birth, Troy Hadn’t-Settled-On-A-Surname-At-That-Point also knew his way around trauma.

So little background problems like his bent spine, snaggletooth, and absent right arm? They stayed in the background.

Mostly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/1. Anyway, it LOOKS like Troy's thumb goes off the side of his hand if he folds it over. Am I off it?


	2. Chapter 2

A few months had passed since Dr. Black. Of course the twins hadn’t stayed put. They were compulsive wanderers. A childhood confined to a dying world would do that to a person. Tyreen’s Siren nature compounded the situation since she could never seem to get enough Pandora. 

It was a situation, and not an issue. They got to visit their holy words on more people that way despite not being 100% clear what those holy words were some mornings before Sermon Time, in which case they read Shelley or Homer and nobody noticed. They did fine without a rooted home, though Troy remained firm in his belief that the only home he even wanted to understand was the small, brash woman who joined him on stage. She was portable, after all. Less chance of losing her that way, and he’d already almost lost her once.

Their retinue was portable too, at the moment, though they’d had to make some stark decisions about who got what resources in the event of emergencies. Tyreen had taken over that set of calls since she was nothing if not ruthless with her followers-slash-food-reserves. And Troy did understand that he never would have stopped inviting people into their van. He would have done it until the van popped like a balloon. 

Currently, the van was designated their space. It wasn’t especially holy-looking or -sounding, but it was at least the second best van out of the bunch. They had two (or maybe it was three) people blessed with driving privileges if they felt like napping in the back. Tyreen’s Psycho handmatron Cybele was also allowed to ride along. Nobody from the kitchen or medical could go in the van, but they all had kids and kids tested boundaries. Say, the boundary of not touching Tyreen.

He and his sister seemed to be keeping a drift of people who followed on their own times, joining and peeling off and returning sometimes, sometimes not; keeping a distance to the hills behind the main camp. These people followed them as the very definition of _followers_. 

Though Tyreen and Troy hadn’t done anything miraculous or magnanimous. Sure, they’d stepped into a turf war there, maybe strong-armed some gangsters here. They’d read Eridian to people who could barely read at all. They were just living their lives on their own terms and other people wanted in on that. Admittedly, Tyreen’s terms included adoration and his fixing things, which turned out to mean keeping the retinue-proper in some kind of order. Tyreen never would have taken over that, and he wouldn’t have wanted her to anyway. Tyreen did terrible things to bumpers.

He tramped out into his people and their siesta camp. He could hear them snoring and fucking and whispering all around him in spite of the locked up vehicles with their white sun shields glistening overhead. He had to strain his ears to do it, but he’d learned what vibration meant sleep and what pattern of squeaks meant sex and that insomnia reigned arch duke on Pandora given the enormous days, so the whispers went without saying.

When Molly saw him come around the back of the caravan, she all but dropped the motor she’d been fussing with, part of some kitchen implement by the look of it. She broke across the gravel, skidding to a stop at his feet and wiping the flux off of her face.

Troy smiled. It covered up his incidental thought that he had absolutely no idea how old Molly might be. Kids on Pandora got canny pretty quick, but then again, that was something he’d heard and his only other metrics were the ECHOnet and himself. He didn’t count Tyreen. Most children didn’t go around sucking the life out of other living things. 

Molly, whatever her age, held her hands up, gesturing like she was setting the chain closures for his jacket, the good one he wore to business meetings. 

He crouched to speak to her, but still ended up looking at a space six inches West of her face. “Hey, I’m not headed out. Just checking on everybody before Sis and me get on with some godspells.” The mundane, material things came first. Whistling, he managed to meet her eyes for half a blink after all, asking, “You haven’t seen Jos around?”

Molly beckoned him after that New Albion kind of way where all she did was crink one finger. “He’s with the big truck. He said that’s his job now. Did you tell him that?” Her gaze, this second time he caught it, happened to be deeply skeptical.

“I told him he could follow his bliss and he blissed the truck,” Troy assured her. “Figured it’d be better for the family in the long run if he got something he liked to do. We’re not spread too thin right now.” 

Molly’s look softened. Somewhat. 

“Speaking of which.” Briefly, he shuffled out of her footprints, drawing a canteen of water from the precipitator. The apparatus normally took two hands, one to put pressure on the pad below the spout and another to pull the lever. Troy pressed his palm to the pad and rubbed the lever down with his chin. It wasn’t the most comfortable position to get into, but soon enough he ended up screwing the lid on the freshly filled bottle and making his way back to the girl’s trail.

It was a hot, dull kind of day, the sky draped with clouds and Elpis peering dingy through them. Troy was sure he’d be back at the precipitator soon enough himself, the same way he was sure Jos, if he hadn’t been, should have been. The air felt and tasted like dust rinsed in exhaust fumes. That was also getting to seem a bit like another kind of home, at least familiar in a way the ozone-slippery whiff in the wind gave away sunshowers on Nekrotafeyo. 

Jos wasn’t a Tink, but his genetic modifications ran Tink-adjacent. He had an extra finger on each hand and two extra toes on each jointed foot. His eyes were wide and beady and his limbs thin for their strength. When he brought his wrench down, the whole camp rang, but, then again, the whole resting portion of that camp could absolutely sleep right through the noise. 

Also, Jos threw things regardless of his mood. He stalked over to Troy and Molly, tipping his head rather than bowing. His resting bitch face continued.

“Thanks,” said Troy. The bowing people had already started to wear on his nerves, only mostly because Tyreen kept sniggering about it. 

Jos cast about. “What’s the good word?” he ended up asking.

“Legs. Spread the word.”

“Old joke much, God King? Eh, what do I know about God Time though…”

“About as much as I do. Seriously, how’s the truck?” He meant the supply trailer which occupied the center of camp and any procession they might make down what was almost a road. 

Some part of what Troy said though had Jos edging back to his own space in a subtle sort of way. “It’ll be fine as soon as I get the new coolant line checked for leaks. Your… car? I really should rebuild the steering column.”

Troy wasn’t sure if he’s said too much or not enough for this person’s ease. He knew though that he’d been operating under the assumption some vehicles liked to pull to the left. Jos had set him right on that point, and besides, the van turned out to be very, very old, strapped together in places, not so much quirkily engineered as failing. 

Troy should have determined that himself, but he’d once run a combat simulator on old ECHO guts. He was used to things operating a bit sideways. 

He left that for later, holding the canteen out to Jos. “You know what? Fine.” Fixing the van equaled more time and resources than he wanted to spend, but the act would keep Jos happy and the van running a little while longer.

Jos ducked his head again at the gesture. “I haven’t done anything to earn this, my God King.”

“It’s to _drink_ ,” Troy corrected.

Molly sighed. So did Jos. Troy unscrewed the cap and held it in his teeth as he tipped a tablespoon of water onto Jos’s dreaded hair. “Blessed be the mechanically-inclined brothers for they will lead us around the desert with minimal explosions, something I appreciate, because explosions suck. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.”

That said and done, the man firstly shook like a wet dog and secondly lunged for Troy, snatching and the canteen and the cap, pulling them into her own presence as if wary of them escaping. “I should be the one bringing you water!” he spat, and then walked off.

Troy turned down to find Molly still frowning at him in her small way. 

It was funny— these past few weeks, he hadn’t had much of a problem going out on top of ridges and giving proclamations. But looking Molly in the face… well, he knew her and Ima and Cybele. It was different in some way he couldn’t place. He could do it. He also really didn’t want to do it in some way that lurked slippery in his bones.

He could have done the steering column too. They weren’t so complicated. That though, that suddenly wasn’t his job anymore. His job was to keep all of these people in some kind of line. And the closer ones, preferably alive until their situations changed. 

“You should drink some water too,” Molly piped up. 

“I should,” said Troy. 

The two of them about-faced and meadered back towards the precipitator. Molly’s path strayed more this time around, some other thought in her head leading her away from the clear path she had used before. Troy chose not to disturb her. They had that in common, she and he, that they thought and they moved in one breath. 

If he had to guess, he’d have supposed she was born with that habit. Troy had grown into it now that he wasn’t perpetually on the lookout for something to eat. He had people for that now too. And he had to say, he liked being able to step back from his walks, so to speak. In this case, it occurred to him that they could certainly use another precipitator, maybe two, in case the followers came begging, what with Pandoran summer on the horizon. Allegedly, summer meant more rain in certain parts of the planet. Maybe they should lead the retinue elsewhere? But the idea of wet summers was based on archaeological data and explorer anecdata. What if it was more like the Dry on Nekrotafeyo, but without groundwater reserves in bone caverns? 

Molly rushed ahead of him. She drew him a big plastic bladder of water while standing on her tiptoes to reach the lever. Then she gave it to him with a hushed sort of look on her face, as if she thought he might somehow turn her down.

“Thank you,” Troy said.

She went red as a blood bruise all over her little face, pulling her skirt into a courtesy. “Is there anything you think, I should, umm, do?”

“Whatever you were working on is fine. Bliss means bliss for everybody.” He thought that was official doctrine. Maybe if they found an ex-Atlas paper pusher to keep track or laid off the pot he’d know for sure. For now, Troy took a big, wet swig where he knew Molly could see him, kind of how he used to do with Mom sometimes when he was coming out of a dizzy spell and she insisted he drink. He headed off to the half a dozen things he still needed to check on.

As he walked, he thought of Molly at the pump, how she offered him something he could very well have gotten for himself. 

That was what reminded him of the evening with Dr. Black, his question. Did Molly think he needed work? Molly was a child. If she had that opinion though, she must have gotten it from someplace, say the adults in her life, or maybe Ima, who was younger but more worldly. 

Troy paused. He looked down on the place beside him where most men would have had a second arm. A whirl of wind-touched sand rolled underneath him. 

He both thought of his right shoulder as empty and had no perception of emptiness there. He’d never known what it was to suffer a fourth limb. And it still didn’t bother him, the absence of something he had never grasped. The scar itself sucked and frankly resembled a vulva, but plenty of Pandorans had sucky scars.

He thought right then: _What if I had_ something _there?_

Troy didn’t picture himself with a proper wing, of course. He saw himself with a tiny, broken glob of feathers and bones on that side. And then he saw himself with a provision inventory in his hand. What the provision inventory would say, he didn’t know that at all. For the time being, he walked on. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/1/2021.


	3. Chapter 3

Spring lasted fifteen years on Pandora. It was nearly over. 

The seismic weather changes between winter and spring had nearly destroyed humanity’s foothold on the world. Now more waited in the cumulous and no one knew quite how they would happen.

The crust had already coughed up space crystals out of spite, but that wasn’t the only thing that had changed in the moment. There were maybe seven people who understood anything about the others. Troy didn’t count himself. He had only observed.

After the Vault opened, the way Tyreen ate became different too, or was becoming different. Where before she’d left sand behind or glass baubles, now every so often she would get Eridium, small whirls of it or spines that popped out of bodies. She seemed to be eating faster too, whole people in mere seconds. Those people now had so much more nuance to their tastes. 

Troy could tell men and women and otherwise apart from his share of their life, note the burnt bitterness of cancer and the floral whiff of certain hormone adjustments. He enjoyed the sensations, probably more than he should have.

He didn’t know about his sister, particularly that evening. 

She’d fed him what he thought was a good dinner, relaxing and rich and composed of people operating a trafficking ring. Nothing said “leave our followers alone” like “here’s the screaming face of your boss trapped in glass”. 

It should have been  _ satisfying _ , but now Tyreen sat on the edge of their bed, poking at her stomach. She’d bothered their vape pen once or twice without starting it up and nibbled the throat of their bottle of gin.

One of the women she’d eaten had been ripe and sweet and primed for new life. Troy could still taste her a little. He thought Tyreen could too. He  _ knew _ something was bothering her and that she didn’t enjoy having reminders of her own reproductive capacity shoved in her face by strangers.

Since Tyreen was barren as the space between stars. 

A younger Troy wouldn’t have thought she’d give a damn, but that was a lot of screaming and emotional arithmetic ago. His journey with his somebody to take care of was just what he’d concluded before the Children of the Vault: traumatic and laced with things that couldn’t be fixed.

He could maybe dampen this unfixable thing, and right now too. Troy slid over the sheets, settling himself behind his sister. Ever so slowly, he wrapped his arm with hers, disturbing her fingers out of her pajama top.

Insult to injury, Tyreen didn’t have the map pointer mark on her chest like most Sirens. She had it on the soft spot at the bottom of her belly.

When she snickered at him, he told her, “I’d get you one of if I could,” and patted her there.

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “It’s not the end of the world. It’s not…” 

Shrugging, she applied the gin bottle to her mouth, with purpose this time. “Whatever.” She then offered him some too, and he drank, smacking his lips when he finished. 

She hummed at him and he hummed back. It was almost an end to the conversation and they were almost going to flop over, watch some other streamers for research, jokes they could steal.

Tyreen said, close enough he could see the lime dye stains on her gums, “Well, you know. If you wanted. With Cybele. I’d be pissed, but I’d get over it.” 

The idea had crossed Troy’s mind like he’d crossed Cybele a few times. But there were complications: Cybele’s job, Cybele’s age, the fact Tyreen had almost certainly not asked Cybele about this, his own  _ not otherwise specified _ . 

He made a few sounds, none yes or no. “Hmm, you know? I ah. Had an idea for something we could do to add to our followers besides DIYing it.”

“This?” Tyreen popped the top button on her pajama top.

“If you want to be that kind of god, go ahead and sunburn your tits.”

“Maybe. What’s your idea?”

“I think I want a prosthetic.”

“Wait, what? Are you serious?” He felt her surprise all the way down in her stomach. That, and she sloshed the gin at him again. 

“I’m considering it,” Troy said. He had thought about the topic a lot since a few days earlier at the precipitator. “I could get something imposing and show off! But I might end up sucking at that part, then what kind of god would I be? Not real adaptable, eh? And that’s no good on a planet where stuff’s gotta adapt to do anything besides die all over the place.”

The ghost of summer passed through the conversation. 

Tyreen didn’t seem to feel it. Her eyes glinted and she turned on the bed. She faced him, her knees brushing his leg like when they’d used to huddle together and chat after dark in the Vault. “No, that’s great! You could get knives and tentacles and shit. It’d be so, what did that Doric jerkoff say?, aesthetic!”

“I’d need neon for aesthetics and neon’s more money.”

“So?” In fact, she tossed her hands up about how much so. “Look, Troy, it was one thing running around back, you know, with a freaking pit in your torso. Nobody cared.”

He nodded, despite this not being at all true. Mom and Typhon had actually cared a lot and not in ways he wanted to remember. 

“But how much shit have you gotten about your ‘arm hole’ since we showed up?”

“More than I’d like,” Troy admitted. He told himself he wasn’t going to fumble his scarring, but then of course, there he was, doing exactly that.

“More than makes sense if you actually  _ look _ at the average mercenary contingent. So get a new one.”

“You know, maybe I will!” The prospect of applying a new body part to himself struck him as surreal. It wasn’t even the first time the prospect got his heart cranking with just  _ how weird _ . 

But something did happen for the first time. Tyreen put her hand on his empty shoulder, feeling in the same way as a curious creature tasting a new food, not simply bandaging or trying to get his attention or leaning against him at the easiest spot. “It’s not even OK, right? Doesn’t it, like, hurt?”

“I don’t have normal sensation,” Troy said, repeating the words from Dr. Black. “I could just get that looked at. A whole arm’s asking a lot from people who don’t have much.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask for the room. Or the gin.”

“I know. Cybele did. Somehow. But, it’s also admitting, you know. We’re not really…”

“Not our fault mere mortals can’t appreciate our grace and shit. We  _ have  _ to dress up.” Tyreen sat back, gesturing theatrically. So, the touch ended as suddenly as it had begun. “You feel me here?”

Troy nodded. He might have been answering the wrong question to himself, but he still nodded.

“Besides. Mom said we were perfect.”

“She said you were perfect.” He did alright laughing that off. One, Tyreen’s infectious enthusiasm. Two, he was getting tired of the truth about Leda:  _ she was ready to let me die before she killed herself instead. Poor Mama. It’s not like I can blame her. Much. _

Realizing the extent of her grief over him and her own situation had made her clear in his heart again. Maybe that was why he’d remembered more these past few months, catching her smile from the corners of his own and wondering.

Anyway, Tyreen pushed him down on the mattress. He landed spread-eagled with his feet dangling off of the edge. She fluffed him like a pillow, fitting herself to his torso and hips and his armpit where she blatantly sniffed him, but that was just her. She felt silky and firm, ticklish given her straying toes. 

She held her ECHO (cherry red with a big slap of packing tape on the back) and he messed with the signal. They called about 80% of the people they scanned over lameasses or douchebags or something like that. Lately, they’d been into this one guy who reviewed exploitation movies. The movies themselves came off hollow to people who’d actually been through firefights with blood spurting out of anybody’s torso. But he had a nice voice. Maybe that was the appeal?

Troy might have a better voice too if he did something about his teeth. He’d had more room for his tongue for certain. He’d enjoy having more room for his tongue. Did he need that though, and if so, was it more or less than an arm? The arithmetic for this project was starting to mount.

His sister tapped him with the gin bottle. “Also, I can sleep on either side.”

“You’d sleep against an ice-cold mechanized performance arm?”

“You sleep with a harbinger of actual fucking doom four nights outta five.”

“Yeah, but harbingers are warm.”

He got one more nudge for that and then Tyreen finished the gin without asking him if he wanted any more. It made her extra warm to the touch and he didn’t care.

Troy remained more or less where he’d started. He was going to have to think about this.

Instead, the gin he had managed left him thinking about his mother for a change.

Had she figured it out when she was looking at his crooked spine on their fetal scan? One of the surgeries she’d performed on him? Had she simply known, somehow down in her own bones, when they hurt what he guessed was a little like his did?


End file.
